School Pictures

I only went to school here for half a year. There shouldn't be that much to say.

Yet when I saw the school blocked off from the roadway by a pelt of grass, grown in over the past decade, despite driving past so many times before, this time I turned and went searching for it, the lost way in.

As if by intuition, I selected the right road, and came up on a run-down house, a car smashed to smithereens under a tarp in the mix of a sand lot and yard that preceded the abandoned structure. I was nervous, in that half-excited way that has your heart pounding in your chest, awake and alive again from the shock of just one small deviation.

It hadn't been so long since the building closed, at least according to the internet- ten years- but the time was long enough for weeds to thrust up between numerous cracks in the faded pavement, the spots where parking spaces and the pickup lines for buses once stood just barely legible. I pulled around to the corner of the parking lot furthest from the street, though it was a dead-end and there was no traffic coming or going. There was an oddly placed apartment complex separated from the building's property by only a steep hill and a chain-link fence. I wondered briefly- or I do, now, in the memory of it- if someone was watching me from one of those curtained windows. Who they were, what they thought. If they knew, remembered even, what this place once was.

I sat for a time in my warm car, staring at the face of the building, trying, I think, to feel something other than that vague excitement. There were no letters on the gray sides of the building, its flatness so uniform to the sky above that it seemed in danger of disappearing into the horizon, the trees just overhead growing down over its windows, vines like draping arms, limp hands letting go at the end of a long day. It was early afternoon, just before 2, the time I was most likely to, if I'd been home alone, wander aimlessly around my apartment with a sense of existential dread or the time in the midst of a long day of work, when I’d hit that godawful slump and want so desperately to nap the rest of the day away.

I went here once, I thought dumbly, watching the series of black, narrow windows that watched me blankly back, revealing nothing. I cracked open the door, taking my phone in one hand and shoving it into my coat as I exited the car. The frozen air of early January enveloped me, biting my cheeks and taking the breath just briefly from my lungs. It was that liminal time not just of day but of year, that space just after New Year's Eve, the dull hangover of the holidays, the shiny resolutions, the time best known maybe as the 'what now?'

'Huh,' I muttered to myself as I propped one hand up, focusing the phone camera on the face of the school. I walked across the lot to the sidewalk, listening to the distant roadway, but more than that, underneath, the silence. What continued like always, and beneath that, what had, without my knowing, stopped.

I follow the walkway around the school. Inside one of the windows, I can see the legs of chairs hoisted up on desks, as though the students within just left yesterday, and any moment might be coming back. Why didn't anyone take these things and move them out? It gives me a feeling I can't put a name to, disturbs me in some way I can't vocalize.

Around the side of the building stands the bones of an old swingset, the gravel beneath its feet overtaken by weeds. There is nothing else in its vicinity and this confuses me- surely we must have had more of a playground? I don't remember ever playing here, but I assume others did, which was why it felt wrong not playing, why I felt conspicuous on the blacktop, waiting to go inside again. Or am I confusing this with another school? Half a year is not a long time, and most of what I remember is the before, when I met my soon-to-be principal and when she switched my class at the last minute, concerned with how withdrawn I was and afraid that my assigned teacher would be too tough. I don't remember my first day, but I remember worrying about it, lying in my Nana's darkened basement, dread balling up in my chest. There is no helplessness like being young.

And like a self-fulfilling prophecy maybe, it was not fun. It was not okay. The other children sniffed out my wrongness like blood in the water and I couldn't wait for summer, and before that for home, for bed, for those brief lily pads of respite before another round on the firing lines.

I reach the side of the building one can't see from the street. The sidewalk passes under a covering, revealing a cement corridor that leads into a hidden, overgrown atrium. There is a path slicing through the middle of it to a door obscured by an obstinate bush. I stand steps from the opening and survey this secret garden of urban decay, the dark panel of windows on either side keeping solemn watch. Part of me wants to continue, to breach the path where feet haven't trod in months, maybe years, but I stay were I am. The silence is disquieting and the sense of being an intruder on a scene I'm not meant to see is slowly settling over me. I wonder if any cameras log my visit, if right now I'm being put down somewhere for trespassing. Before me on the cement walkway there are faded numbers counting down from ten. Above me a circular recessed light creaks in the breeze, hanging from its socket, and makes me flinch.

It's cold, and I'm ready to get back in my car, but there's a part of me that's not ready to stop looking. Here I am, I want to say. I remember the story that someone, looking out one of those windows, saw a turkey in this very atrium- then, filled with attractive foliage. In my mind the turkey became a peacock and I peered through when I passed in the hall, looking for the mystical creature. I remember very little of this fleeting period in my life, so little for a time that felt so heavy.

What I remember is shame. I remember how, coming from a Catholic school back in Florida, I made the mistake at lunch one day of saying I loved this boy in our class when asked. A good Christian is taught to love everyone, and I did not understand what I'd done when they started giggling and talking behind their hands, only that I'd made an irreversible mistake, the same mistake that saw me seated across from the chosen cootie kid at a restaurant we took a field trip to, at our own isolated table while the entire class sat across from us and laughed. I remember large primary colors on the walls, a mural around where the library stood, and how I'd check out the same books over and over again, losing myself inside them as private lily pads of sorts. I remember the closing of my throat every time someone spoke to me, and I remember the relief of boarding the bus for the drive home.

I remember one time on that drive, the bus skipped the rental house we were living in, the one with the sewage out back. My voice was stuck in my throat and it was only thanks to some other kid that the driver realized and had to reroute, snaking our way back through the suburban streets. 'Why didn't you say?' he said grumpily, and I had no answer for him, words built up in my chest like a rusted scream.

Now, in the silent atrium, I try to listen for a hint of that old panic. I strain for the sound of children's shouts, the ghosts of my mostly still living peers going about their transformed lives. There is only the distant sound of cars.

As I get back into my own, I take a last look at the building, an abandoned shell that looks like every other meaningless thing. So nondescript and barren, this boogeyman that used to loom so large in my mind. I feel the kind of sadness that comes from letting go of something you weren't even aware you were still carrying.

I built you up so much, I think, and look at you now. And look at me.

I put the key in the ignition. And turn.